Recent articles

Trucking

Before dawn breaks, Domingo Avalos is already off to work.The 50-year-old truck driver leaves at 2 a.m. before his family wakes and returns home long after his wife and 4-year-old son are in bed for the night. On his way to the ports of Long Beach and Los Angeles, he sits in a metal truck cab for hours with a pillow tucked behind his aching back, waiting behind a line of trucks to pick up a cargo container he will haul to make ends meet.He like other truckers will wait six to...

Labor unions

Truck drivers who haul goods from the ports of Long Beach and Los Angeles will vote today whether to launch another strike beginning as early as Monday morning, union officials announced Friday. Truckers hoping to unionize have been fighting for several years over their classification as contractors. They want the companies they work for to...

Labor unions

Select members of a West Coast dockworkers union this week will determine whether to move forward with a tentative labor contract that took nine months to reach in a protracted battle that nearly ground goods movement to a halt.About 90 delegates of the International Longshore and Warehouse Union on Monday began meeting in San Francisco for a weeklong caucus to review a five-year tentative agreement reached last month by their bargaining team and employers. The delegates,...

Transportation and shipping

For the second straight month, the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach saw monthly cargo numbers fall by double-digit percentages, a result of ongoing congestion that has been plaguing West Coast ports.Cargo volumes at the Port of Los Angeles dipped 10.2 percent, to 502,663 container units, in February compared to the same time last year, according to the port, which released its numbers Tuesday. Imports also fell 10.7 percent, to 254,225 units, while exports dropped 10.3...

Business

Top Los Angeles and Long Beach port officials said Tuesday that it will take three months for the nation’s two busiest seaports to clear the thousands of cargo containers left stranded on nearly two dozen ships, a backlog brought on by epic congestion and made worse by contentious labor talks between dockworkers and their employers.The twin ports will need about three months “to get back to a sense of normalcy,” with the first month focused on getting caught up on...

Shipping

After a nine-month stalemate that threatened to cripple cargo movement along the West Coast, and which shook the Inland Empire economy, the International Longshore and Warehouse Union and Pacific Maritime Association on Friday reached a tentative five-year contract, sources said.“Finally, our ports can get moving again and everyone’s feeling great that there’s an agreement,” Long Beach Mayor Robert Garcia said in a phone interview shortly after word of the...

Port operation

With cargo flow through the nation’s two busiest seaports plummeting by double-digit percentages, the head of the Port of Los Angeles said Thursday that if no contract agreement is reached between West Coast dockworkers and their employers, both sides will go to Washington, D.C., for meetings Tuesday.At the Los Angeles Board of Harbor Commissioners meeting, Executive Director Gene Seroka said there is a “federally mandated deadline on those negotiations directly from the...

Transportation and shipping

LONG BEACH >> A national oil workers strike could spill over to the Port of Long Beach, a seaport already besieged with unprecedented bottlenecks. About 100 members of the United Steelworkers who work on the Tesoro oil terminals at the Port of Long Beach may go on strike if the union and Tesoro cannot come to an agreement on benefits.“We’re trying to get Tesoro to come to their sense and negotiate with us,” said David Campbell, secretary-treasurer of...

Port operation

After months of shipment delays caused by bottlenecks at the Los Angeles and Long Beach ports, Paul Scott had decided enough was enough.The director of Design 88 Inc., an Austin, Texas, firm that designs and manufactures greeting cards and envelopes used by floral and grocery stores across the U.S., could no longer tolerate weekslong delays of cargo. The company, which employs 10 workers, recently lost a highly profitable order because it could not guarantee a timely shipment arrival.

Labor negotiations

President Barack Obama will send his labor secretary to California to meet with the West Coast dockworkers union and their employers to help settle a nine-month contract dispute that has slowed goods movement at West Coast ports to a crawl, the White House announced Saturday. White House spokesman Eric Schultz said Obama is asking Secretary Tom Perez to intervene...